Instead of my scheduled classes today, I was fortunate enough to participate in a province wide conference held by C2C. Instead of all being together in a conference room for the weekend, we had the opportunity to schedule zoom lectures about various topics of interest. Unfortunately, due to the high demand a lot of these zoom lectures were full leaving us student teachers very little options. The lectures me and a few colleagues of mine decided to participate in was ‘Sharing Early Years Wisdom as a Community of Practice’ and ‘Ocean Literacy.’
During my first workshop there was a lot of discussion based and resources shared from a specific specialized program down in the Kootenay’s. The program being discussed is a three-year soft start program used for children transitioning into Kindergarten. Although when I become a teacher I will not be teaching children this young, I still think it is important to go through the steps and understand what these children are facing. Transitioning into the next grade can already be quite difficult for younger grades, but these children have never had to do anything like this before. Therefore, the transition from home life into Kindergarten can be considered one of the most difficult transitions. The ladies who ran the program shared a lot of personal stories about their own experiences working within the program and expressed that the children participating in these programs had an overall easier time transitioning into Kindergarten. As a future member of SD57, I would like to see if we have similar programs within our district and see how they are used within the schools around Prince George.
The other workshop I participated in was Ocean Literacy. Going into this lecture I assumed that we would be talking about and given resources about how to use the topic of oceans within a classroom to promote literacy amongst students. Quickly, I learned that Ocean Literacy is its own form of literacy and it is about the understanding and influences the oceans have on us and we have on the ocean. Although this was a very interesting topic I felt like the speaker shared a lot of personal stories that do not necessarily apply to me, living in land locked Prince George. My colleagues and I had to Google the closest ocean and its 8 hours away! If this speaker had the time to explain more of his work I wonder if I could apply some his is strategies and concepts to rivers, since Prince George has a lot more to do with rivers than the ocean.
Throughout this entire conference, I had the lens of assessment on, searching for how other teachers talk about and view assessment. Unfortunately, I could not find one conversation about assessment and how other teachers thought about assessment. Relating back to previous learning about summative assessment, research does show that every teacher does assessment differently and this could potentially be why I was unsuccessful at finding these conversations. Also, If I had the opportunity to choose different workshops maybe those workshops would have led to more chances to talk about assessment within the classroom. But, during ‘free’ time my colleagues and I did begin discussing math assessment. Coming from strong mathematical backgrounds, we tried to see where self-assessment and feedback could be interwoven into high school mathematics. We both struggled with understanding exactly how this would look inside of a classroom, but were able to brainstorm a few ideas to allow high school math teachers move away from standardized tests such as incorporating more manipulatives or using a showing of learning rather than multiple choice options.